All sides should step back from the brink.
All sides stand to lose.
Power-sharing is the positive way forward. Everyone should heed His Majesty’s call for unity. His Majesty expresses this far better than I can.
But the alternative – of the country breaking up, of “ruin” as His Majesty calls it, is too horrible to contemplate.
Decades of hard-won progress, as Professor Stephen Young correctly points out, should not be jeopardised.
Just a glance, reading now…regarding civic attitudes and responsibility, that is an area that needs serious study, survey and reform. There is little recognition of obligation toward the public in general, not just in good works but in all walks of life, including traffic regulations while driving, etc.
Suthichai is just parroting a royalist lexicon on democracy. It has nothing to do with democracy, real and existing or otherwise. Politicians are corrupt and self-serving hence representative institutions via elections are never acceptable (except to sort out a crisis of authoritarianism). This is why constitutions also don’t matter. Solution? Thai-style democracy where the good and great rule why the politicians fiddle around, get a cut, but don’t really matter, a la Prem’s period in power as PM. Suthichai, the appointed senators and so on are just doing their “job” for this long line of opposition to electoral politics. It is starting to look like re-run of the debates that began in 1992?
Ouch – I’m still coming to grips with the fact that (the ingeniously-named?) reg herring thinks Yoon and I share anything……..
But I think he (reg) is a tad sweeping with most of his remarks. I don’t think I have many illusions about the prospects – past, present and near future – for anything much like “real” democracy (as in OMOV that works and is allowed to stand) here in the Kingdom. That said, the optimist in me still sees a two-steps-forward-one-back (and baby steps at that) movement that ever so stutteringly looks something like progress to the goal.
Just one further bit of distancing myself from Yoon – I don’t have a horse in this race……. vested or otherwise).
The problem for both Yoon and Steve here is that there is scant evidence that genuine democracy has ever had any foundations in Thailand. All attempts to build those foundations have always been subverted by the cleverclogs in society for their own enrichment. It is exactly the same with the ‘shirts’. They are essentially paid mercenaries in a power struggle which has never had anything to do ‘democracy’. Why pretend? (Unless one has a vested interest in supporting a particular faction.) I have seen nothing happen in the last 20 years that did anything to improve social justice. Same in other countries for that matter. Just more of the tyrrhany of big business.
There is a question of culpability when asking what someone did to someone else. It is not a matter of being so elevated that one is removed from moral and ethical responsibility, but of remaining aloof and permitting (perhaps through concerns for personal safety) things one does not agree with. When it comes to culpability, no one can excuse anyone from genuine involvement in wrongdoing. In law, perhaps, but not in moral human convention.
There is a supposition that those around the monarchy are acting in its best interests, in the best interests of the country and of the people. That supposition is being forced on everyone by hook and crook, and by gun when those don’t work.
Moral and ethical culpability are often not raised as a public issue until the restraints that keep them off are removed – through revolt, through change of heart, through guilt. Thailand has tried to ignore this reality all along, and surrendered sense to nonsense, altruism to greed, love to hate and independence to conformity.
I guess coup leaders cab be defamed because their pursuits are noble and their persons unassailable. Case closed.
As to comments like “I’ll die for the king,” they are often made by people with hatred in their heart and guns in their belts, people who have determined how you and I should behave and are willing to “die” (AKA ‘kill’) for their zest.
It’s no wonder aliens are avoiding this world! Barbarity is legion.
The label of “utter hypocrite” doesn’t really do justice to Yoon for this article. The most blatant example (but just one of many) that earns it is: “Instead of engaging in a healthy debate on the best way to get the country back on its feet, the various political groupings choose the simplistic and dangerous tactic of pinning ‘yellow’ and ‘red’ labels to split society.” With the possible exceptions of ASTV/Manager and their polar opposites, would he care to point to one media outlet which is more guilty of this than his own – with himself as cheerleader?
He refers to “the ongoing parliamentary debate on ‘political reform’ (whatever that means for the general public)”. Does it occur to him that The Nation might usefully take on the task of trying to explore and explain what “that means for the general public”? Of course not – the lopsided agenda-driven Nation is incapable of it and has other fish to fry.
His own closing line serves perfectly to sum up the charge that should be laid at his door: “The protagonists in the ongoing political war may have their own reasons for destroying each other. But when they manage to kill people’s faith in the very foundation of a genuine democratic system, that is inexcusable”. Spot on.
More than that, nganadeeleg, according to today’s Bangkok Post, the “prosecution said Daranee verbally attacked the CNS by saying the military coup had caused great damage to the country.” Now that must be defamatory! Maybe the court agrees that it is defamatory because they agree that the palace organised the putsch?
She also used bad words….
Not sure what she said, for this isn’t the speech available on the clips I think, where she calls Prem a katoey and makes accusations of fratricidal regicide.
The coverage of the north is pretty awful regarding highland ethnic minorities, but supposedly okay or even quite good about the lowland peoples. The entry on Yao (Mien, Iu Mien) is based, often word-for-word, on Bunchuai Srisawat from about 1950 (according to Yoko Hayami, something similar is the case with coverage of Karen peoples). The issue of ethnic diversity is not a new feature in Thai publishing but this and other encyclopedia projects (such as that by Mahidol University) are quite interesting as a sign of their time and place. My reading is that they exaggerate Thai-ness in two ways, one by playing up the difference of non-Thai peoples from modern society and the other (not in the Enc. of Thai Culture but in various other publications) of playing up (inventing, even) basic similarities among Zhuang (in China), Black Tai (in Vietnam) and various Tai/Thai. There is, in some quarters, a prospecting for Thai essences that coincides with various modernist ideologies such as the urban, middle-class one of delighting in the happy peasants bursting into song and dance on weekends.
The royalists are sure making Da Torpedo pay and making her a high profile warning to all others who want to attack them and their buddies. It is now reported that that Daranee has been convicted in the Criminal Court and fined Bt50,000 for defaming a bunch of generals and coupmakers during a red shirt rally in 2007. These were figurehead leader of the 2006 coup General Sonthi Boonyaratklin, one of PAD’s best buddy generals Saprang “I’ll die for the king” Kalayanamitr, Privy Councilor (when he’s not being PM) General Surayud Chulanont and Privy Council president and, of course, the chief coup booster and palace go-to man General Prem Tinsulanonda.
Living in a rice growing village in Surin and observing and writing about rice culture, I’d endorse the fact that labour shortages are now very real. People are increasingly reluctant to do the back breaking job of planting out the rice and expect more for the work. And as it’s seasonal work, they just aren’t there in the villages.
Likewise when it comes to harvesting it’s hard to find the labour. Hiring a mechanical harvester gets it home and dry very quickly and incidentally this enables the small farmer to recover some of the cost by getting paid in the time that’s been freed up to cut other peoples’ rice.
Mechanical harvesting even in Isaan is thus increasinglyeconomical but a feature is that some rice is wasted. It is thus another factor in lower yields.
Japan uses mechanical seed drills that presumably achieve a higher yield.
I would venture that being unduly labor-intensive is a major factor in the low yield. Thailand’s farms have traditionally been absent from anywhere near efficient mechanization, and this seems to have contributed heavily to the production problem.
Actually, use of the word ‘imperial’ also describes Siam/Thailand in the extreme in the past, and Laos is merely one ruins to attest to the fact.
I wish I could write Thai even 10% as well as your English is, and apologize in advance for correcting a phrase you used…”HM will come to pass” as the phrase should be “HM passes on.” the phrase “Come to pass” means to occur, or to happen.
As to your point, however, regarding slapping Washington consensus gurus in the face and so on, Thailand already has a plethora of Hugo Chavez’s and hardly needs another.
As to contingency plans by the US, I believe that history has proven either that they don’t work or are misengineered at the very begining of what many rightfully see as American-instigated contingencies. The Middle East morass is a major exclamation point in this regard, and it seems as if no amount of reason, common sense, appeal to human rights or civil sensibilities will ever convince Washington to stay out of places it does not belong. But, that also holds true for Thailand and every single other country in the world, all of whom pay lip service to non-interference but who practice, by desire and necessity, the opposite from time to time.
So you are told what links to click. All that matters is the right number of hits. Result = “503 Service Unavailable.” One gets nothing out of the experience, but it isn’t done to complain. That figures. And furthermore no one has complained yet. Indeed, I am probably highly gullible in commenting at all.
Enough turns of the hamster wheel to satisfy your curiousity? Perhaps just “psychology of the masses” is description enough.
I’m watching Japanese reality TV. Things can’t get much more banal than that? In the old days, I worked for a pittance to eat. I still work for a pittance, to keep people like Gordan Brown & Thaksin happy. Why are they always such miserable bastards?.
Do you think the imperial US (where the imperial Thaksin obtained his PhD) has already a contingency plan for “regime change” in Thailand when HM will come to pass? For one, if this country becomes unstable, and the economy turns into a downward spiral, that would be a slap on the faces of the proponents of the Washington Consensus, and serve as fuel to the likes of Hugo Chavez who criticize that the liberal model of economic development in Thailand (once the darling of the WB and IMF in the late 80s and early 90s) is simply untenable.
I’d like to add on the adoption of modern rice varieties that Thailand’s clearly an outlier. MV were planted at the end of the 1990s over only 18% of rice area. Comparative figures are more than 90% in Vietnam and Philippines and more than 50% in all other SEA countries, except Malaysia and Cambodia for which I couldn’t find recent data. In Laos, the rate of adoption went from less than 1% to more than 50% in about a decade.
On Thailand and its choice of taste (higher quality and price) over quantity, see Rerkasem B. (2007) Having Your Rice and Eating It too: A View of Thailand’s Green Revolution. ScienceAsia, 33(s1): 75-80.
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17 August 2009: petition day
All sides should step back from the brink.
All sides stand to lose.
Power-sharing is the positive way forward. Everyone should heed His Majesty’s call for unity. His Majesty expresses this far better than I can.
But the alternative – of the country breaking up, of “ruin” as His Majesty calls it, is too horrible to contemplate.
Decades of hard-won progress, as Professor Stephen Young correctly points out, should not be jeopardised.
Asia Foundation study on Thai democracy
Just a glance, reading now…regarding civic attitudes and responsibility, that is an area that needs serious study, survey and reform. There is little recognition of obligation toward the public in general, not just in good works but in all walks of life, including traffic regulations while driving, etc.
Suthichai Yoon on faith and delusion
Suthichai is just parroting a royalist lexicon on democracy. It has nothing to do with democracy, real and existing or otherwise. Politicians are corrupt and self-serving hence representative institutions via elections are never acceptable (except to sort out a crisis of authoritarianism). This is why constitutions also don’t matter. Solution? Thai-style democracy where the good and great rule why the politicians fiddle around, get a cut, but don’t really matter, a la Prem’s period in power as PM. Suthichai, the appointed senators and so on are just doing their “job” for this long line of opposition to electoral politics. It is starting to look like re-run of the debates that began in 1992?
Suthichai Yoon on faith and delusion
Ouch – I’m still coming to grips with the fact that (the ingeniously-named?) reg herring thinks Yoon and I share anything……..
But I think he (reg) is a tad sweeping with most of his remarks. I don’t think I have many illusions about the prospects – past, present and near future – for anything much like “real” democracy (as in OMOV that works and is allowed to stand) here in the Kingdom. That said, the optimist in me still sees a two-steps-forward-one-back (and baby steps at that) movement that ever so stutteringly looks something like progress to the goal.
Just one further bit of distancing myself from Yoon – I don’t have a horse in this race……. vested or otherwise).
Mandate to rule?
[…] […]
Suthichai Yoon on faith and delusion
The problem for both Yoon and Steve here is that there is scant evidence that genuine democracy has ever had any foundations in Thailand. All attempts to build those foundations have always been subverted by the cleverclogs in society for their own enrichment. It is exactly the same with the ‘shirts’. They are essentially paid mercenaries in a power struggle which has never had anything to do ‘democracy’. Why pretend? (Unless one has a vested interest in supporting a particular faction.) I have seen nothing happen in the last 20 years that did anything to improve social justice. Same in other countries for that matter. Just more of the tyrrhany of big business.
Suthichai Yoon on faith and delusion
“But when they manage to kill people’s faith in the very foundation of a genuine democratic system”
What, you mean like the coup leaders? Clearly they can’t have had much faith in a democratic system or they wouldn’t have tried to override it.
Thailand’s royal disgrace
There is a question of culpability when asking what someone did to someone else. It is not a matter of being so elevated that one is removed from moral and ethical responsibility, but of remaining aloof and permitting (perhaps through concerns for personal safety) things one does not agree with. When it comes to culpability, no one can excuse anyone from genuine involvement in wrongdoing. In law, perhaps, but not in moral human convention.
There is a supposition that those around the monarchy are acting in its best interests, in the best interests of the country and of the people. That supposition is being forced on everyone by hook and crook, and by gun when those don’t work.
Moral and ethical culpability are often not raised as a public issue until the restraints that keep them off are removed – through revolt, through change of heart, through guilt. Thailand has tried to ignore this reality all along, and surrendered sense to nonsense, altruism to greed, love to hate and independence to conformity.
Thailand’s royal disgrace
I guess coup leaders cab be defamed because their pursuits are noble and their persons unassailable. Case closed.
As to comments like “I’ll die for the king,” they are often made by people with hatred in their heart and guns in their belts, people who have determined how you and I should behave and are willing to “die” (AKA ‘kill’) for their zest.
It’s no wonder aliens are avoiding this world! Barbarity is legion.
Suthichai Yoon on faith and delusion
The label of “utter hypocrite” doesn’t really do justice to Yoon for this article. The most blatant example (but just one of many) that earns it is: “Instead of engaging in a healthy debate on the best way to get the country back on its feet, the various political groupings choose the simplistic and dangerous tactic of pinning ‘yellow’ and ‘red’ labels to split society.” With the possible exceptions of ASTV/Manager and their polar opposites, would he care to point to one media outlet which is more guilty of this than his own – with himself as cheerleader?
He refers to “the ongoing parliamentary debate on ‘political reform’ (whatever that means for the general public)”. Does it occur to him that The Nation might usefully take on the task of trying to explore and explain what “that means for the general public”? Of course not – the lopsided agenda-driven Nation is incapable of it and has other fish to fry.
His own closing line serves perfectly to sum up the charge that should be laid at his door: “The protagonists in the ongoing political war may have their own reasons for destroying each other. But when they manage to kill people’s faith in the very foundation of a genuine democratic system, that is inexcusable”. Spot on.
Thailand’s royal disgrace
More than that, nganadeeleg, according to today’s Bangkok Post, the “prosecution said Daranee verbally attacked the CNS by saying the military coup had caused great damage to the country.” Now that must be defamatory! Maybe the court agrees that it is defamatory because they agree that the palace organised the putsch?
She also used bad words….
Not sure what she said, for this isn’t the speech available on the clips I think, where she calls Prem a katoey and makes accusations of fratricidal regicide.
Anyone know for sure?
Review of Southern Thai Encyclopedia
The coverage of the north is pretty awful regarding highland ethnic minorities, but supposedly okay or even quite good about the lowland peoples. The entry on Yao (Mien, Iu Mien) is based, often word-for-word, on Bunchuai Srisawat from about 1950 (according to Yoko Hayami, something similar is the case with coverage of Karen peoples). The issue of ethnic diversity is not a new feature in Thai publishing but this and other encyclopedia projects (such as that by Mahidol University) are quite interesting as a sign of their time and place. My reading is that they exaggerate Thai-ness in two ways, one by playing up the difference of non-Thai peoples from modern society and the other (not in the Enc. of Thai Culture but in various other publications) of playing up (inventing, even) basic similarities among Zhuang (in China), Black Tai (in Vietnam) and various Tai/Thai. There is, in some quarters, a prospecting for Thai essences that coincides with various modernist ideologies such as the urban, middle-class one of delighting in the happy peasants bursting into song and dance on weekends.
Thailand’s royal disgrace
How can a coup leader be defamed???
T.I.T.
Thailand’s royal disgrace
The royalists are sure making Da Torpedo pay and making her a high profile warning to all others who want to attack them and their buddies. It is now reported that that Daranee has been convicted in the Criminal Court and fined Bt50,000 for defaming a bunch of generals and coupmakers during a red shirt rally in 2007. These were figurehead leader of the 2006 coup General Sonthi Boonyaratklin, one of PAD’s best buddy generals Saprang “I’ll die for the king” Kalayanamitr, Privy Councilor (when he’s not being PM) General Surayud Chulanont and Privy Council president and, of course, the chief coup booster and palace go-to man General Prem Tinsulanonda.
Another reason for low rice yields
Living in a rice growing village in Surin and observing and writing about rice culture, I’d endorse the fact that labour shortages are now very real. People are increasingly reluctant to do the back breaking job of planting out the rice and expect more for the work. And as it’s seasonal work, they just aren’t there in the villages.
Likewise when it comes to harvesting it’s hard to find the labour. Hiring a mechanical harvester gets it home and dry very quickly and incidentally this enables the small farmer to recover some of the cost by getting paid in the time that’s been freed up to cut other peoples’ rice.
Mechanical harvesting even in Isaan is thus increasinglyeconomical but a feature is that some rice is wasted. It is thus another factor in lower yields.
Japan uses mechanical seed drills that presumably achieve a higher yield.
Andrew Hicks
Another reason for low rice yields
I would venture that being unduly labor-intensive is a major factor in the low yield. Thailand’s farms have traditionally been absent from anywhere near efficient mechanization, and this seems to have contributed heavily to the production problem.
Lost for words
Actually, use of the word ‘imperial’ also describes Siam/Thailand in the extreme in the past, and Laos is merely one ruins to attest to the fact.
I wish I could write Thai even 10% as well as your English is, and apologize in advance for correcting a phrase you used…”HM will come to pass” as the phrase should be “HM passes on.” the phrase “Come to pass” means to occur, or to happen.
As to your point, however, regarding slapping Washington consensus gurus in the face and so on, Thailand already has a plethora of Hugo Chavez’s and hardly needs another.
As to contingency plans by the US, I believe that history has proven either that they don’t work or are misengineered at the very begining of what many rightfully see as American-instigated contingencies. The Middle East morass is a major exclamation point in this regard, and it seems as if no amount of reason, common sense, appeal to human rights or civil sensibilities will ever convince Washington to stay out of places it does not belong. But, that also holds true for Thailand and every single other country in the world, all of whom pay lip service to non-interference but who practice, by desire and necessity, the opposite from time to time.
“For want of a nail…the kingdom was lost”
So you are told what links to click. All that matters is the right number of hits. Result = “503 Service Unavailable.” One gets nothing out of the experience, but it isn’t done to complain. That figures. And furthermore no one has complained yet. Indeed, I am probably highly gullible in commenting at all.
Enough turns of the hamster wheel to satisfy your curiousity? Perhaps just “psychology of the masses” is description enough.
I’m watching Japanese reality TV. Things can’t get much more banal than that? In the old days, I worked for a pittance to eat. I still work for a pittance, to keep people like Gordan Brown & Thaksin happy. Why are they always such miserable bastards?.
Lost for words
Do you think the imperial US (where the imperial Thaksin obtained his PhD) has already a contingency plan for “regime change” in Thailand when HM will come to pass? For one, if this country becomes unstable, and the economy turns into a downward spiral, that would be a slap on the faces of the proponents of the Washington Consensus, and serve as fuel to the likes of Hugo Chavez who criticize that the liberal model of economic development in Thailand (once the darling of the WB and IMF in the late 80s and early 90s) is simply untenable.
More on Thailand’s low agricultural productivity
I’d like to add on the adoption of modern rice varieties that Thailand’s clearly an outlier. MV were planted at the end of the 1990s over only 18% of rice area. Comparative figures are more than 90% in Vietnam and Philippines and more than 50% in all other SEA countries, except Malaysia and Cambodia for which I couldn’t find recent data. In Laos, the rate of adoption went from less than 1% to more than 50% in about a decade.
On Thailand and its choice of taste (higher quality and price) over quantity, see Rerkasem B. (2007) Having Your Rice and Eating It too: A View of Thailand’s Green Revolution. ScienceAsia, 33(s1): 75-80.
For a major source of stats on MV, see http://beta.irri.org/solutions/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=250 . Data for Laos can be easily found on google scholar.